Dave Harper

Fulbright-University of York Scholar Award (All Disciplines)

Colonel Dave Harper is Head of the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in 2012 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. His research focuses on Book History, the poet statesman John Milton, Eighteenth-Century literary criticism, and Interregnum and Restoration texts.

His recent publication “The First Annotator of Paradise Lost and the Makings of English Literary Criticism” (Studies in English Literature, 2019) was awarded Honorable Mention for the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for a distinguished essay on Milton. His book, Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism (forthcoming from Routledge in 2023) reexamines how the reception of Paradise Lost shaped the development of literary criticism.